This blog post is about how I left my mom in 2016/7 feeling rejected by her and pained by the sight of her balcony. Now, it is the Eve of the night that I will be closing out her flat, and the balcony, as her health has declined and was moved to care home earlier this month.…♥

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Eve, the first woman in the garden. The evil. The fallen. Eve, the before-the-thing. The Christmas Eve, the night before the wedding. A time when we don’t feel even, and excitement abounds – anxiety, desire, anticipation.

Tonight is an eve.

One of the reasons I left for Montreal in 2018 is that I couldn’t stomach riding the #14 bus from Cummings Bridge unto Rideau Street in my mom’s – then, my – hometown of Ottawa, Ontario. The bus would drive up the roads along my Vanier condo, and would stop in front of my mom’s apartment building at a time where I felt her rejection. I would look up at the top flat, the balcony – and think: man, I grew inside the belly of the woman who lives up there. Right fucking there. I was attached by an umbilical cord to the woman who has that top balcony. Look at my belly button: it is proof. And now: she doesn’t want to see me.

Offers to go see a movie at Bytowne Cinema, rejected. Dates canceled for her preference for bingo, or her siblings. Or a TV show. Because I’m like my Dad – articulate, and intellectual. Because I am me: wondering why our family dynamic wasn’t as pristine as many of my boyfriends’ families, and certainly not as respectful as those families I saw among my friends’ parents and siblings. Because I didn’t properly understand her social anxiety – and because I expected more from my Mom than she was offering. I refused the ceiling. I got so fucking tired of knocking my head up against it.

When I was born at 11:07 am on April 6 in the 70s, my Mom’s experience is conveyed with pure annoyance. Her face crinkles as she told the story, “oh my god, you wouldn’t stop CRYING… uh ahhh uhhh … I had to give you to your father??!” She made the hand gestures of passing me off. Throwing me away like a small desperate infant clutching at the mom’s hair — BE GONE, she was feeling! YECK!

When I returned from the jungle in 2023 and the jungle visions, for weeks I had nightmares of black jaguars, black things over my bed. I had indeed had healing with Grandfather Mapacho who seemed to integrate what Grandmother Ayahuasca was showing. In bed, those black things weeks later — I did grasp them finally, and tackle them successfully, I did. When they started to fade away, a voice came from a stern but loving, powerful and graceful voice — with no measure of good or bad. It said: “She doesn’t want you.”

At that point in 2023, I had lived a lifetime wondering, “Does my mom love me?” I would open birthday cards and even though they were in English alright, they read as Chinese (a language I don’t understand). What were these sentiments of “I’m so proud of you, daughter!” and “I love you so much, daughter!” What? I didn’t understand those words, I didn’t feel them. I didn’t feel them. I didn’t feel them like I felt them when my father would say, “I Love You, Sylvie Hill.”

So could I only F E E L love in absence? Christ almighty, it sure does explain why (m)used two men abroad in London for so long!

My dad lived away. Divorced in 1979 when I was 5. He is a sociopath. He has scared the living shit out of women. He’s terrorized his daughters. But hurt people hurt people, and I’ve nothing but love and understanding for him. I didn’t need jungle juice for that – I always intuited my Dad’s crazy ways, I felt I could see through his madness. I loved visiting him when my parents divorced. He and I cuddled. I held my Dad’s hand anytime I could. We strode the mall halls like a King and Queen when he’d pick me up for the retail clothing store I worked at – him in his Harry Rosen garb and Rolex, and me in my elegant pant suit and heels. His hugs were great. He listened to me. Nurtured my education with intellectual conversation and wondrous LONG dinners sat at the dinner table, us eating second platefuls. He also shared a photo of my messy bedroom to the girls at the store when I was in the back fetching my purse — to humiliate me. He also checked out my coworker’s young lithe bodies. He also told my cousin back in the 70s that he wished she wasn’t his niece – and not because she was embarrassing. The opposite. Quite worse.

I felt my Dad’s love, as I did his wrath. But my understanding of my mom’s love was – a mental thing. “I put food on the table for you! A roof over your head!” She did that so I guess any emotional need, comforting and soothing, soft touch and warm hug were just extreme asks.

I distanced myself from Ottawa and from the balcony upon which the woman whose belly I grew inside lived.

From 2015 to 2024, I did not talk to her. Then my friend Anna – a mother herself – encouraged me to try. To be brave and try. Plant medicina had already given me courage thru visionary forgiveness a year prior, and I felt it was ‘safe’ to call. I did. My mom sobbed and sobbed, grateful for the connect.

A few calls I’d make to her, including pushing her HARD to repair past shit. I could hear my old boyfriend Mark saying, “WHY DON’T YOU JUST TALK TO YOUR MOM ABOUT PASTA, HOLY SHIT!!” … instead of demanding from her what she couldn’t give: an articulate, well-argued explanation and apology for the crap that went down, which caused me so much hurt in life. Accountability – could she take some? That bitch! To which another boyfriend, Tony, would spend four hours one day (including marathons other times) over a case of 50 and a pack of smokes getting me from vitriolic hurt and explosive launches to … tears and so much compassion for what my mom had suffered in life. It was his mom, Kay, who said “your mom needs a lot of love.” Same with another boyfriend’s Dad. Oh, they just didn’t understand! But they all did. Especially Rhys, who counselled that parents are like bulls in a China shop sometime (maybe that’s where she got my birthday card lol) … they just don’t get us, or understand us, and say shit because they are ignorant, but not intentionally trying to hurt.

It wasn’t nice for me to push – but goddammit, could I just get that apology for ONCE? We moved on from that … and I went to visit her on April 6, 2025. She was lovely – so frail, though. Didn’t have that bitchy edge of “I don’t care what you say,” and was elderly. She kept wanting to give me my baby book full of baby treasures she had saved, and photo albums.

I left them there – likely to not admit she knew something about her timeline. And with hope there would be “a next time.”

There was no next time. Mom declined and has been put into a home in the last weeks. She’s loving it, is so cared for by staff and her Guardian Angel, my Aunt K.

My sister, also an Angel, has been working in collaboration with my Aunt to help sort out mom’s affairs.

Last weekend, I had another reunion. It was with that sister – it had been 16 years since I saw her in person. She was managing mom’s apartment – cleaning it like a mother fucker, sorting through everything, making piles of stuff for me … for mom … for her. She wrapped the dishes I wanted in paper. We laughed and talked, and shared stories.

My sister left to go back home down in Southern Ontario. This week, it’s my turn.

Tonight is an eve.

Tomorrow, I’ll meet my Aunt and we’ll receive the charity peeps who will take away mom’s furniture. Empty the place out.

I will go on the balcony and have a proverbial smoke, I think. I wish I had a mapacho…

From the balcony upon which I saw the woman from whose womb I exited and felt / assumed she wanted nothing to do with me … to the balcony tomorrow that I’ll close, and close off my mom’s last chapter of independent living, I’ll marvel at how we think we have time to waste in misunderstanding with those we need to love, and who love us.

Full circle – balcony to balcony. From rejection to … not rejecting: THAT is what we should strive for in all our hurts.

That’s not to say climb into a dangerous situation. But what feels dangerous to our hearts and egos, may be less a danger and more a cry for help.

Who should we save? Who should we stand by in relentless repair?

Aren’t these questions of any child who suffered emotional deprivation and felt abandoned by those were meant to protect her?

Tonight is an eve. Tomorrow I’ll close up the apartment of a woman who was in an apartment my bus went by, and whom I felt didn’t love me.

My boyfriends would always fight to the end and beyond to prove they cared, some telling me, “Sylvie, you have no idea. No idea…”

And it’s not that I’m trying to make them prove it to me.

It’s just – that balcony felt so empty. So unwelcoming.

And tomorrow again: I’ll stand on it alone.

But grateful I could help those helping my mom in some small way… Those who love and feel her love, and always accepted her for who she was.

And never wished her to be anything but who she was.

That someone – my mom – became someone who too afraid to even go on the balcony…

… as I was too afraid to see her on it when I chose to leave her.

Tonight is the eve of the great return and closing down.

Eve … in the garden teaches the ultimate danger of doubting God’s goodness, and the importance of trusting established boundaries.

Maybe we ought not and never question a mother’s love, then?